At university, there were two defining moments where I was reminded that there is always more to most jobs than meets the eye. When I was studying Kinesiology, I walked past a student society booth where they were selling shirts that said something like “No, I am not studying to be a PE teacher.” Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being a PE teacher, but Kinesiology can be the starting point to everything from interface design to medical school. When I volunteered for a student newsletter, I took the heat (rightfully so) for allowing an article to go to print where a staff member typecasted people holding a certain accounting designation. He was quoted as saying that they were more focused on regular, day-to-day accounting tasks while members of another accounting designation were controllers, or in business management. This painted quite the unnecessarily extreme picture of the different designations.

There are assumptions about jobs that might turn us away from a possible career path when we don’t even know half the truth. Or, we might think the world about a profession (based on some limited knowledge) and then be sorely disappointed when we realize what it’s really like.

My current job title is simply “Editor”. But if I were to allow people to go on thinking “oh, so you just correct spelling errors” then maybe nobody would want to become an editor, no matter how fun it is to make sure “wierd” never happens.

Officially, I tell people that I edit articles, books, and marketing material about my company’s web Content Management System and the Open Source industry. But if you analyze only the editing part, taking the book I’m currently working on as an example, there are many different types of editing. We run through roughly three editing stages:

• Technical — Here I make sure that the information is correct (learning a lot of new stuff in the process) and that the necessary prerequisite knowledge for specific concepts is explained or referenced.
• Substantive — Questions I keep in mind include: “Is this the best order of topics?”; “Does the text flow nicely?”; and “Are we taking the best approach to explain this?”
• Copy — This stage is the closest to what most consider proofreading, where I look for spelling and grammar errors, but also adherence to our style guide, consistency in style, and lots of tagging stuff (the book is written in XML, a structured tag language similar to HTML).

What I like best about the job is that I work on interesting technical material (where thankfully only a small part of it is technical manual sort of stuff) and I also get to touch upon so many aspects of the organization, from internal development material to marketing brochures. It’s a convenient way to continuously learn without having the pressure to know everything or worse, be tested on it! Also, this type of “job diversity” (I’ve forgotten the exact HR term) keeps my job fresh and enjoyable.

Because editing is needed across so many processes, slowly I’ve gotten the chance to try many things outside of the strict “Editor” role. When I started working at this job a year ago, the job description never spoke of: writing marketing material; managing our local website and blog; using our content management system to implement technical solutions; tweaking our training and certification process; doing layout design; providing (internal) technical support; and meeting with customers and users.

I’m certainly thankful that there’s more to editing than proofreading. There’s even more to being an editor than editing! And I think you’ll find out that this is the case with most jobs. Remain curious and question people about what they really do (and don’t do) at work.

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